Well here’s my first post from my house. Gotta say that buying the thing and moving totally sucked but so far owning it totally rocks.

A couple things I learned about moving. Don’t forget to have the power put in your name. Yup day two in the house and the power was shut off because unlike in Madison the gas and electric companies here are separate. Also make sure none of your hard drives come loose in your NAS during the move. Luckily it was set up as RAID 5 and rebuilt the array so I lost nothing.

Some first impressions in the new room:

Bigger IS better - although my new listening area is only 1 1/2 foot wider and 4 feet longer and now with a vaulted ceiling it makes a huge difference. It’s taking lots more power to get the SPLs I was use to not to mention now being able to turn it up. Also getting the M80s away from the side walls ( 3 3/4 feet) and the front wall (over 4 1/2 feet) makes the imaging much better.

Audyssey still sucks - well for me and my Denon 2807 it does. It’s still EQ-ing the 67 through 250 Hz ranges from -3 to -9 dB depending on the speaker, the center being the worst. Makes male voices sound hollow and flat. Also this time around the auto setup is setting all my speakers to large every time. And once it even set the subwoofer distance to 6.5’ when it was sitting about 12’ away.

Doors leak one hell of a lot of sound - I was afraid that the wood frame stucco construction would let out lots of sound but actually it’s not so bad nor are the double pane windows. Both are attenuating the sound about 35 dB at the outer wall. At the property line to the closest neighbor it’s down by about 45 dB. OTOH the front door leaks like crazy only down about 20 dB. Anyone got any ideas how to soundproof a door?

M22 center still beats the crap out of the VP150 for music - no contest even in a bigger room sitting farther away the M22 sounds so much better I stopped the A/B comparison after 3 tracks. OTOH for movies I think I prefer the VP150. It has a more “wall-of-sound” quality that complements movies. I’ll compare this more later but for now I’m using a M22.

May not need a false wall for sound - having the L & R M80s over 12’ and 4’ from the front walls respectively seems to negate the unsymmetrical nature of the wall on the front soundstage. Now the question is if I need one for the screen.

Quite is good - I spent most of the last 3 days here and in that entire time the only outside sound I heard was the faint sound of something driving buy once. It helps that my end of the subdivision is off a dead end road that will never likely have through traffic because of the Agua Fria “River.“ Also the walls must be well insulated because I never heard the many neighborhood kids even once.

The office “Media Room” rocks - having a whole room dedicated to equipment and media storage keeps the HT room uncluttered. It allows my equipment rack to stick out at 90 degrees from the wall to both the fronts and backs of everything are accessible. Cabling was so easy I will never push a rack up against a wall again. With the doors closed no equipment sound makes it into the HT room and the heat dissipates out the other door into the hall and bedroom.

IR goes through glass and a curtain at the same time - I thought I was going to need an RF remote but the IR blasts through the office door even when covered by a curtain. Also, enough of the signal reflects back to hit the TV allowing everything to work perfectly.

Carpet sliders are even more cool than I thought - this time before setting up my equipment rack and TV I put carpet sliders under them. Makes moving them fairly easy w/o having to disassemble everything.

White walls and light leakage suck - boy was I spoiled by blackout setup I had in the apartment. I guess I could live with a little light during movies but not for video games.

One thing I’ve learned already is that many of my preconceptions about how things would work were wrong. I’ll take a step back and reevaluate some of my priorities and preconceptions before making any major improvements. I ended up doing much more work than necessary in the apartment because I jumped in with both feet. This time around I’ll take my time and do more things incrementally. Besides I’m going to get dragged off to Florida and Hawaii in a couple of weeks anyway. Damm work! Now where‘d I put my sex wax.

Got my blinds installed today and they are awesome. 9 sets of custom double cell blinds from Lowes including a horizontal slider for the arcadia door for $1700 installed. Not only were they on sale %20 off but they also gave me a 10% military discount.

Most are blackout blinds which work much better than I had expected. There is some light leakage around the edges but I had them made extra wide so it’s minimal. Since the room will also be curtained, with blackout curtains where needed, that should take care of most of the leakage which I can fine tune as needed. BTW thanks for the Velcro idea Zimm.

A curtain store just down the street has already said I could buy a sample of each curtain I want to try and return the ones I don’t want so that part should hopefully be painless.

Now I just have to decide if I want to take a minimalist approach (my nature) or do a theme.

On Saturday I made one last attempt to find some local retail furniture that would work for me before going with a local custom furniture maker and it finally paid off. Just last week Mor Furniture put out black leather reclining chaise lounges with firm padding. While there not HT (i.e. no cup holders) and way big they weren’t that expensive so I got 3. Did I say they’re big? No WAF no problem I say.

Should be emailing the dimensions for my curtains to Dazian tomorrow (thanks for listing them on your site Randy). Joan in fabrication has been a great help getting me on the right track. She sent me nice size samples to test out and has been a wealth of helpful information. Not only do they have the perfect fabric, “Carbonite II,” they’re total cost to make them is going to be 1/3 of what any local custom curtain makers were asking.

I’m making arrangements to paint the walls before hanging the curtains. Even though it will be 360 degree blackout with the curtains closed I just think the contrast with black curtains on white walls will be to stark when they’re open.

Question for anyone interested. What colour walls do you think would work well with a black ceiling, curtains furniture and tan blinds.

I also need to replace the carpet but was going to wait to see how dark I really need it first. Would having matching carpet and walls look better than different colours if I broke things up by painting the baseboards and other trim another colour? Here’s where no WAF = Dean needs help.

I have always been told you want the drapes to match the carpet, but they may not have been 'aboat' HT. Considering you want to wear Ninja pants to hide the light from your legs, I would aim for dark carpet. To break it up, consider one with light patterns on a dark background.

Can't believe they already have a 4000 out. Damn, I though I would have a year without upgraditis.